Executions in Oklahoma and Texas include father who beheaded 3 children
Two men were set to be executed in the US on Thursday, including a Texas father who beheaded three young children he was raising in a 2003 killing that rattled a community along the US-Mexico border.In Oklahoma, James Pavatt was also set to die by lethal injection for the fatal shooting of the estranged husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair.Prosecutors say he carried out the killing with her, and she is currently the state’s only woman on death row.The US is on track to surpass 40 executions for a second consecutive year, a pace driven by Florida as the death penalty comes under renewed attention.Last week, California Gov.Gavin Newsom announced he would commute hundreds of death sentences before leaving office, which experts say would be the largest mass clemency in American history.Pavatt, 73, was set to be put to death at Oklahoma’s state penitentiary in McAlester.
John Allen Rubio, 46, was set to be put to death later in Texas at the state prison in Huntsville.Rubio and his girlfriend Angela Camacho were accused in the killings of 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E.Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio in the squalid, windowless apartment they shared in Brownsville, located on Texas’ border with Mexico.Camacho pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.Rubio’s first capital murder conviction in the killings was overturned by an appeals court, which ruled that statements by Camacho were wrongly allowed as evidence in his trial.Rubio again pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity for his second trial but he was once again convicted and sentenced to death.Rubio, according to court records, wasn’t the biological father of the two older children but treated them as if they were his own.At various points, Rubio claimed the children were possessed and that he was the “chosen one” intended to save the world.
Defense experts diagnosed Rubio as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, a determination rejected by prosecution expe...